I smoke ten to fifteen cigars a day. At my age I have to hold on to something.

George Burns (1896–1996) cultivated a late-life public persona as a genial centenarian who always had a cigar in hand. In interviews and stage appearances from the 1970s onward—after his career resurgence and especially as he aged into his 80s and 90s—he often joked about his daily cigar habit, turning it into a comic emblem of endurance and routine. The line about smoking “ten to fifteen cigars a day” and needing “to hold on to something” fits this self-mythologizing, using the cigar as both prop and punchline: a way to deflect concern about health with humor while reinforcing his image as an unflappable survivor of show business and time.

The quip works by reversing expectations: instead of treating heavy smoking as a vice to abandon with age, Burns frames it as a practical necessity—something literal to “hold on to.” The joke depends on double meaning: the cigar is a physical object in his hand, but also a symbolic anchor amid the losses and uncertainties of old age. More broadly, it reflects Burns’s comic philosophy of aging—meeting fear, decline, and moralizing advice with wit and self-control. The line also underscores how performers use signature props to stabilize identity; the cigar becomes a portable stage mask that lets Burns remain “George Burns” even as everything else changes.